Contents
Business Value of Microsoft Power Platform
This course takes you through Power Platform, giving you an understanding of what Microsoft Power Platform is and what kind of value it can provide you and your organization.
Learning Objectives
- Explain each application, what it does, and when to use them
- Understand how Power Platform communications with other Microsoft products
- Understand administrative tasks and determine from which admin center they can be accessed
- Define data loss prevention policies and understand security options within Power Platform
Intended Audience
- Users looking to learn about the core components of Power Platform and additional insight into how their data connects within it
Prerequisites
- No prior knowledge of Microsoft Power Platform is required
Power BI is a powerful tool that you can use to analyze data and create impressive data visualizations on reports and dashboards. To fully grasp the functionality of Power BI, it is important you can explain the difference between workspaces, dashboards, reports, and datasets. Starting off with the largest scale element, we have workspaces. Workspaces are essentially boxes that house dashboards, reports, and datasets. There are two types of workspaces: a personal workspace that's called My Workspace and standard individual workspaces.
The main difference between the two of them is that My Workspace is where you can access and interact with your own content, where the standard workspaces allow you to collaborate and share content with colleagues. As I mentioned, a workspace is like a box that contains a dashboard, reports, and datasets. So, let's take a look at those elements now. A dataset is simply a collection of data, and each dataset can be a part of multiple workspaces.
A report is a single or multiple pages of visualizations of a single dataset within that workspace. Reports within Power BI can have a multitude of different visualizations that display insights from the data it's reporting. Some of these visualizations are as simple as a bar chart while others are more in-depth, like the key influencer visual that helps you understand factors affecting a certain metric. And finally, a dashboard is a user-created canvas that can be customized to show different visuals from various reports. Think about a dashboard as a place to gather information for a specific topic from different reports, which you can then share to other users. Alongside these elements, there are also different versions of Power BI that allow different functionality. Now, Power BI does offer a mobile application, which you can use to view and interact with your report and dashboards. However, the two main versions we will quickly cover are a desktop application called Power BI Desktop and an online SAS service called Power BI Service.
Power BI Desktop is an application you can download onto your computer that you can use to visualize and analyze your data. You can design reports based on data models you create within Power BI Desktop, and those reports can then be published to the Power BI Service. Power BI Service on the other hand is a web-based service that allows you to create dashboards, share apps, and analyze your data. The best way to think about these two programs would be to utilize Power BI Desktop when you want to create reports and data models and to use Power BI Service to distribute those reports.
Lee has spent most of his professional career learning as much as he could about PC hardware and software while working as a PC technician with Microsoft. Once covid hit, he moved into a customer training role with the goal to get as many people prepared for remote work as possible using Microsoft 365. Being both Microsoft 365 certified and a self-proclaimed Microsoft Teams expert, Lee continues to expand his knowledge by working through the wide range of Microsoft certifications.